the dining room the gilt is so bright you have to wear sunglasses to look at it; but upstairs the carpets are as bald as the head of an Ottoman eunuch.
The hotel has a policy of naming its bedrooms after distinguished guests, which has unconsciously acted as a graph of its dramatic post-war decline: from before the war you can choose to sleep in Ataturk, Mata Hari or King Zog of Albania; after it there is nothing more exciting on offer than Julio Iglesias.
At dawn the Sea of Marmara appears like a sheet of silver, with the stationary ships sitting as if welded to its surface. Now, at night, it becomes invisible but for the lights of passing ships and the distant lamps of Uskudar and Kadi Koy – Byzantine Chalcedon – shining across the Bosphorus.
From the old Byzantine Acropolis to the waters of the Golden Horn, the yellow glow of the sulphurous streetlights silhouettes the city’s skyline, with its minarets and rippling domes and cupolas. The perfect reflections of the great Ottoman mosques and palaces that form in the water below are intermittently shattered by skiffs and caiques crossing and recrossing the Hellespont. No other city on earth has so magnificent a position. With its remarkable configuration of hills and water, sitting astride the land and sea routes connecting Europe with Asia, the Black Sea with the Mediterranean, and commanding one of the greatest anchorages in the world, there could be no more perfect position for a great imperial city.
For over a thousand years Constantinople was the capital of Christendom, the richest metropolis in Europe and the most populous city west of the great Chinese Silk Route terminus of Ch’ang-an. To the Barbarian West Byzantium was an almost mythical beacon of higher civilisation, the repository of all that had been salvaged from the wreck of classical antiquity. In their sagas, the Vikings called it merely Micklegarth, the Great City. It had no rival.
From the Great Palace on the shores of the Sea of Marmara Justinian, probably the greatest of the Byzantine emperors, controlled an empire that ran from the walls of Genoa clockwise around the Mediterranean to the Pillars of Hercules at Ceuta, embracing Italy, the Balkans, Turkey, the Middle East and the North African littoral. From Constantinople armies were dispatched to build a line of border fortresses on the Tigris, to repair the walls of Rome and to reconquer North Africa from the Vandals. Architects were ordered to construct basilicas in the marshes of Ravenna, on Mount Zion and in the sands of the Sinai. When the Emperor ordered Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus to build the greatest church in the world and dedicate it to Haghia Sophia, the Divine Wisdom of Christ, stone was specially brought from as far afield as Libya, the Lebanon, the Atlantic coast of France, Mons Porphyrites in the distant deserts of Southern Egypt and the green marble quarries of Hellenic Sparta.
Half a century later, when John Moschos arrived in Constantinople, the city probably had a population of around three quarters of a million; it was said that seventy-two different tongues could be heard in its streets. Coptic monks rubbed shoulders with Jewish glassblowers, Persian silk traders and Gepid mercenaries who had walked to the city after padding across the ice of the frozen Danube. In the city’s great markets and bazaars, Aramaic-speaking Syrians would haggle with Latin-speaking North Africans, Armenian architects and Herule slave traders who knew only some debased dialect of Old German. Goldsmiths, silversmiths, jewellers, ivory carvers, workers in inlay and enamel, weavers of brocade, sculptors and mosaicists all found ready markets for their wares. Already, by the second quarter of the fifth century, the city boasted five imperial and nine princely palaces, eight public and 153 private bath houses; by the time of Justinian there were over three hundred monasteries within its walls.
Few who were brought up in this most cosmopolitan and sophisticated of cities could bear to leave it for long. ‘Oh, land of Byzantium, oh thrice-happy city, eye of the universe, ornament of the world, star shining afar, beacon of this lower world,’ wrote a twelfth-century Byzantine author forced to absent himself on a diplomatic mission, ‘would that I were within you, enjoying you to the full! Do not part me from your maternal bosom.’
After its fall to the Turks in 1453 the importance of the city was, if anything, increased. For the next two hundred years the Ottoman Empire was the most powerful force in all Eurasia, and Constantinople again became the Mediterranean’s greatest port. The sixteenth-century Grand Vizier Mehmed Sokollu Pasha simultaneously planned canals between the Don and the Volga, and the Red Sea and the Mediterranean; one day he might send armaments to Sumatra to thwart the Portuguese, the next choose a new King of Poland to thwart the Russians. He ordered pictures and clocks from Venice, decorated his capital with one of the most beautiful mosques ever built, and commissioned an eleven-arched bridge over the River Drina which was only recently destroyed by Croatian bombs.
The achievements of early Ottoman Constantinople were built on the foundation of religious and ethnic tolerance. The great majority of senior Ottoman officials were not ethnic Turks, but Christian or Jewish converts. At a time when every capital in Europe was ablaze with burning heretics, according to the exiled seventeenth-century Huguenot M. de la Motraye there was ‘no country on earth where the exercise of all Religions is more free and less subject to being troubled, than in Turkey’. It was the gradual erosion of that tradition of tolerance under the tidal wave of nineteenth-century nationalism that as much as anything finally brought down the Ottomans.
The end result of that sterile hardening of attitudes is that Istanbul, once home to an inspirational ferment of different ethnicities, is today a culturally barren and financially impoverished mono-ethnic megalopolis, 99 per cent Turkish. The Jews have gone to Israel, the Greeks to Athens, the Armenians to Armenia and the United States. The great European merchant houses have returned home, the embassies and the politicians moved to Ankara. For all its magnificent monuments, for the first time in two millennia, Istanbul now feels almost provincial.
It is ten years since my last visit to this city. Since then much has changed: many of the old wooden houses with their intricately latticed balconies have been swept away and replaced by grey apartment blocks. A smart new tram rattles around Sultanahmet, past new flotillas of Russians squatting on the pavements trying to sell their sad piles of Soviet junk: shapeless jeans, hideous shirts and sub-standard leather jackets. There is a blight of seedy news-stands filled with a surprising profusion of Turkish hard porn (there is even a glossy called Harem; one notices these things after a week in the celibate purity of Athos). The most striking change of all, however, is the rise of the Islamic right, which this sort of thing has helped to bring about. On every wall are election posters for the hardline Refah party, which recently won the municipal elections both here and in Ankara; there is now serious talk of them sweeping into power nationally at the next election. In the meantime many of the young men have taken to wearing thick, moustacheless Islamic beards, while their womenfolk are increasingly shrouded in veils.
In many ways, Turkey’s development since the Second World War seems to have followed exactly the opposite course to that of India. There Gandhi tried to wean the whole country onto dhotis, non-violence and spinning wheels; the result was crass materialism and the almost daily burning of brides in ‘kitchen accidents’ if they fail to deliver the new moped or colour television promised as dowry. In Turkey Ataturk tried the reverse approach: he banned the fez, outlawed the Arabic script and tried to drag the Turks kicking and screaming into Europe. The result: a resurgent Islamic movement, mullahs being cheered in the mosques whenever they announce that the earth is flat, and the sophisticated career women of Istanbul competing with each other to wear the most all-enveloping veil or medieval-looking burkha.
ISTANBUL, 17 JULY
This afternoon I walked along the Golden Horn to the Phanar, the oldest surviving institution in the city and the nearest thing the Greek Orthodox have to a Vatican. For in a series of humble buildings surrounded by a modest walled enclosure in Istanbul’s backstreets lives the successor of St John Chrysostom, the senior Patriarch to millions of Orthodox Christians around the world.
The Patriarch’s secretary,
